Industries

Ryan W. Buell

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Ryan W. Buell is an assistant professor of business administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Managing Service Operations in the MBA elective curriculum and in Executive Education programs at the School. He has also taught the Technology and Operations Management course in the MBA required curriculum.

Professor Buell’s research investigates the interactions between service businesses and their customers, and how operational choices affect customer behaviors and firm performance. He is affiliated with the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. His work has been published in Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Harvard Business Review. It has also received media attention from outlets such as TheNew York Times, The Boston Globe, The Financial Post, BNET.com, Wired, The Guardian, and Forbes.com.

Ryan W. Buell is an assistant professor of business administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Managing Service Operations in the MBA elective curriculum and in Executive Education programs at the School. He has also taught the Technology and Operations Management course in the MBA required curriculum.

Professor Buell’s research investigates the interactions between service businesses and their customers, and how operational choices affect customer behaviors and firm performance. He is affiliated with the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. His work has been published in Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Harvard Business Review. It has also received media attention from outlets such as TheNew York Times, The Boston Globe The Financial Post, BNET.com, Wired, The Guardian, and Forbes.com.

Professor Buell earned a DBA in Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, where he received the Dean's Award and the Wyss Doctoral Research Award. He also received an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a BBA with high distinction from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Prior to his graduate studies, Professor Buell co-founded and managed the Tour Now Network, an online real estate virtual tour service. He has also worked at McKinsey & Company and General Motors.

As Americans' trust in government nears historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs. One explanation for this trend is that citizens may be unaware of both the services provided by government and the impact of those services on their lives. This short talk describes research that suggests that operational transparency, revealing the work that government does, can improve resident perceptions of the government and improve support for government programs. For more details, click here to download the research paper, Surfacing the Submerged State with Operational Transparency in Government Services.

While existing theory suggests that increased contact between customers and employees diminishes efficiency, recent research demonstrates that when employees can see their customers, the beneficiaries of their efforts, the quality and efficiency of the service they deliver can actually improve. Studies in food service show how revealing customers to employees can lead employees to feel more appreciated, enhancing their job satisfaction and willingness to exert effort. For details, click here to download the research paper, Creating Reciprocal Value Through Operational Transparency.

A ubiquitous feature of even the fastest self-service technology transactions is the wait. Conventional wisdom and operations theory suggests that the longer people wait, the less satisfied they become; we demonstrate that due to what we term the labor illusion, when websites engage in operational transparency by signaling that they are exerting effort, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results—even when those results are identical.

Managers typically look for ways to reduce wait time to increase customer satisfaction. New research suggests there's a better approach: showing customers a representation of the effort, whether literal or not, being expended on their behalf while they wait. (The prototypical example is the travel website Kayak, which shows customers each airline it searches.) Studies show that customers prefer waiting when the work being done is transparent-even when the waits are longer or the results are no better than those obtained with shorter waits.

Numerous studies in the services literature have demonstrated that self-service customers are retained with greater frequency than their full-service counterparts. There are two competing explanations for this phenomenon. Either self-service channel usage promotes customer satisfaction and in turn, loyalty, or it imposes switching costs on customers that make it more difficult for them to defect. Our empirical analysis of multi-channel banking customers suggests the latter – that self-service customers may be retained through switching costs, not satisfaction effects. In fact, the results of our analysis suggest that self-service customers aren’t just stuck, they’re actually less satisfied.